


satellites singing serenity

by notdarthvader



Series: variations on a shepard hymn [4]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, Destroy Ending, F/F, F/M, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Second Person, Past Female Shepard/Ashley Williams - Freeform, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-05
Updated: 2018-04-05
Packaged: 2019-04-19 00:20:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14225028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notdarthvader/pseuds/notdarthvader
Summary: It takes maybe two hundred and fifty-nine seconds to fall to Earth from the burning split-shatter of the Crucible.Just two hundred and fifty-nine seconds.





	satellites singing serenity

**Author's Note:**

> some mildly graphic depictions of injuries/violence. it's not super focused on so i didnt want to say it was graphic violence, but this is a heads up for you
> 
> title takes from The Wolves, by cyrus reynolds. probably a song that fits shepard better than anything ive ever heard, in both sound and lyrics

you watch the crimson gold spill of light echo above you, like fireworks, like bloodstains draining through the sky, and here, suspended above orbit, in the quiet emptiness of space, there is silence.

and you are alive. maybe.

maybe not for much longer, or maybe you’ll pull off the impossible again. you’ve done it before, you can maybe do it again, but earth is so far away, and you’ve got such a long ways to fall.

fire cannot burn in space, but you’re not sure how long you’ll last hurtling through the earth’s atmosphere, one last blaze of glory, painful and gory, before it all goes quiet.

you think of the last seconds, and the red-hot, white burn blaze that ignited from the crucible, and the dissonant chorus of the catalysts voice, and you think that if snarling _fuck you_ in its face didn’t get your point across, the slow, honey-slip of the reapers sinking to their deaths maybe will do the trick.

the edges of your vision blur, oxygen slipping through your fingers, from your lungs, from your arteries like the slip of time ever out of your reach. you just never had enough time, constantly whisked from one disaster to another. ( _you had enough time to do **something** , during those six months you were locked up in your home, but the alliance was too busy investigating the insides of their own asses. but there’s no use being petty or angry now. now, you are a dead woman, who’s stubbornly alive for a few precious seconds more._)

maybe, you’ll meet him at the bar and say _you missed the tuesday special_. it will be a thursday afternoon, over one hundred years from now, and while you’ll miss him, he’ll do great things for his homeworld, for the alliance, for the galaxy. and you’ll be proud of him, and you’ll laugh with ashley as he sticks his foot in his mouth the first time a woman tries to flirt with him, and you’ll be _proud_.

or, or. or, maybe, you’ll say _you always knew we never had that much time. but, you did mention a bar, so here i am._ he didn’t make it, and neither did the rest of the crew. the reapers got to them before you could destroy the crucible, but that’s okay. the rest of the galaxy is safe, and joker and edi are laughing together where she’s burying him in the sand, and _he_ looks at you, and grins, a little lopsided ( _something he picked up from you, and you never let him forget it_ ), and when he presses kisses that taste like hard lemonade to your lips ( _the pink grapefruit flavor_ ), you sigh and finally come home.

or.

or.

or maybe you wake up, and taste ash and copper and death in your mouth, and you’re hardly more than a corpse, but your heart beats, and you fight-

your body breaks through the earth’s atmosphere as your face breaks through the surf, the salt-sweet crackle of the ocean, of the ozone, burning in your nose.

you break free from the crest, and then you are dragged back down, choking, gasping for air, the sunlight bright shatter of the citadel lighting up the waves around you. if you want to die, you must fight for it.

and if you want to live, you must fight for that, too. because your name is shepard, and when has existance ever been kind to you? your name is shepard, and you bleed, and fight, and rage, and you _do not go gentle into that good night_.

you are made of fury and love, bound in a battering ram of bone and blood. and, if it all came down to it, you would do it all over again.

( _well maybe not all of it. you think of the way you pressed ashley against the glass of the shower stall, and how you could have pinned garrus to the bed **so** much sooner. well. c'est la vie._ )

you are falling, and you are drowning, and you are hurtling through the atmosphere all over again, but this time it’s not the icy foreign slip of alchera beneath you but the all too familiar and distant blue green whisper of _home_.

except that’s not the truth.

it hasn’t been your truth for so long now, because home is a place shaped like a ship, and it’s the quiet lights of your aquarium under the stars. it's the way your crew ( _your friends, your family. who are you kidding anymore, you’re dying. you don’t have to pretend, you don’t have to pretend like you didn’t really only ever want to save the galaxy for them_ ) smiles at you when you talk with them over coffee in the morning, it’s blue eyes and the rattling, broken orders that you just can’t-

you just can’t follow this time.

breathing is a thing you think you forgot at this point, too caught up in falling and drowning under the water, under your own memories, and pain doesn’t really exist anymore, or if it does, you’re too far gone to feel it.

you watch your hands blaze like meteors as the atmosphere takes you, staining scarlet in your trail, and with something like fleeting hope or a desperate gamble, you reach for the steady promise-flicker of the biotics lancing up your spine, pulling a barrier around you like a second skin. and maybe it’s stupid, and maybe you don’t really want to die, or maybe it’ll just be so much quieter when you land, cleaving your skull clean open as the broken pieces of the crucible crash around you.

but maybe-

you taste the salt-sweat of summer sweet on your lips as you kiss him, your cold margarita in hand. You even got that cute little pink umbrella that you’d been meaning to add to your ( _stupid, trivial_ ) cute drink umbrella collection. he licks the salt crystals from your lips, and makes a face when he tastes the lime of it –

a note to self: turians, generally, are not fond of limes, oranges, tomatoes, jalapenos ( _though on a weirder note to self, they really like serranos?_ ), or bread. grapefruit, however, is considered a delicacy in many sects in upper tiered society.

– he makes a face and you laugh, and it’s a sound that’s almost become foreign to you in the past years of fighting and raging and fighting and dying and fighting and-

and-

anyways, he makes that face that he does when he doesn’t like it, and you laugh, and the salt-breeze of the sea is cool against your skin, and your hair is loose, trailing down your back in gentle waves, just like the wine-red sunset colored ocean that stretches before you, and you’re both sitting at that tacky tiki-bar that for some god-awful reason every goddamn tourist beach has. you're sitting on the barstools, and your hands are folded together, and he’s looking at you with the softest, fondest expression that makes you sick, because in what life do you get so lucky where you find this guy who would charge into hell on your command, who would know the shape, the build of you blinded and deafened.

you want to hide your face, you want to look away, but instead, you pull him down, drinks be damned, and kiss him in front of the bartender, in front of your crew who’s been doing _god_ knows what around the beach, and right in front of the ancestors, because fuck the first contact war, fuck years of animosity, and fuck whoever thinks that you two won’t work out. you want to build a home inside his heart, and burrow down there and never leave. of course, the fool you are, he already reshaped his entire existence to fit around you like a well-worn, skin-warmed leather jacket, and maybe that’s why he feels like home because somewhere between the two of you, you took something old and ugly as war and carved a bloody hole in the middle of it for a quiet space of comfort, and maybe-

oxygen hits like a blade to the gut and you gasp. your barrier is in shreds, but still there. now all that’s left is the quiet fall to earth.

when you were spaced, you could hear your own breathing.

here, you hear nothing.

not even the unsteady thud of your own heart.

there is just silence. and the whisper steady promise of the crash at the ground.

you close your eyes, and reach for your biotics, and your spine burns and burns and burns, and your body is already broken, your nerves fried, your skin broken, torn, and there’s a good chance that you might still die before you even hit the ground.

but you close your eyes, and you reach for your biotics, and you taste the salt-spray of the sea, the cherry fizz of his dirty shirley, and the ash-copper crackle of life.

there is a sound like the roar of thunder, like the shattering break of a millennia old machine coming to an end, and the ozone rumble of your biotics through your bones.

then, silence.

you taste ash, and copper.

you taste ash, and copper, and you _breathe_.

**Author's Note:**

> i've wanted to experiment with this kind of style for a long time, and i personally really like the way it turned out. i'm using this to take a quick break from my multi-chapter one i have going. that one should be updated by the end of the week. thanks for reading! let me know what you think!


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